Images from Eight Decades: the 1950s

During the 1950s, Lawrence’s Rad Lab enjoyed an unparalleled run of success. For their pioneering discoveries of atomic elements beyond uranium, Glenn Seaborg and Edwin McMillan shared the 1951 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In 1955, a team led by Owen Chamberlain and
Emilio Segrè, working at the Bevatron, the Rad Lab’s newest and most powerful atom smasher ever, discovered the antiproton, the mirror image counterpart of the normal matter proton. For this discovery, Chamberlain and Segrè shared the 1959 Nobel Prize in physics. A few months earlier, on August 27, 1958, Ernest Lawrence died at the age of 57. In his honor, the UC Regents renamed the Rad Lab as the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory.